Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

The big equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee (above) that was taken down in Dallas a couple of years ago has a new home at a private golf resort at Lajitas, Texas, near Big Bend National Park. Fans of the Marble Man can pay homage after paying a $50 golf cart rental (off-peak greens hours only). Beer and sodas are sold in the pro shop.

Kehinde Wiley’s new sculpture, “Rumors of War,” was unveiled in Times Square in New York recently, and will move to its permanent home at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond later this year. The equestrian statue is a riff on a statue of Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart in Richmond. You can probably guess who’s unhappy about that.

In Shreveport, a planning committee of the Caddo Parish Commission approved an expenditure to relocate the Confederate monument located on the grounds of the parish courthouse. The Caddo Parish Commission had voted to relocate the monument almost two years ago, but were challenged by the local UDC chapter that claimed they not only owned the monument, but also had a “private property interest” in the land on which the monument stood. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their claim of owning the property, and in August 2019 Caddo Parish gave them 90 days’ notice to have the monument relocated. If the monument isn’t moved, the Caddo Parish Commission is expected to formally approve moving the monument itself.

Earlier this year, two members of the “Heirs to the Confederacy” group, Ryan Barnett and Nancy Rushton McCorkle, were charged with vandalizing the Unsung Founders Memorial on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Both had been heavily involved in protests against the proposed removal of the “Silent Sam” monument on campus there. Despite McCorkle’s insistence that the charges against them would be dismissed, and declining a plea offered them, they were both found guilty last month of injury to real property and larceny, I believe the latter because they stole a UNC flag that they paraded the next day at another rally (above). Barnett was also convicted of indecent exposure and for urinating on the Unsung Founders Memorial. Interestingly, the court found them not guilty of ethnic intimidation under North Carolina statute, because the law focuses on targeting individuals. “My belief is they are not guilty of ethnic intimidation [as defined by the statute],” Orange County District Court Judge Lunsford Long said. “I think they intended to intimidate a whole race of people, not a person.”

Finally, we shouldn’t leave Nancy McCorkle and thre “Heirs to the Confederacy” folks without a mention of Daniel McMahon (right), a man from Florida who went out of his way to taunt UNC students online, and aligned himself with McCorkle, praising her on the far-right chat site Gab, saying “Nancy Rushton makes a damn good admin too!” McMahon, posting under the alias “Jack Corbin,” corresponded with the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter on Gab, and reportedly praised him after the mass shooting. McMahon was indicted by the Justice Department in September for making threats and intimidation against a candidate for City Council in Charlottesville, and against UNC students.

These people are exactly who you thought they were.

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